Swimming at Kitsilano Outdoor Pool

Kitsilano Pool, run by the Vancouver Park Board, is the longest outdoor swimming pool in North America at an impressive 137.5 m long. Its filtered seawater is crystal clear and artificially heated to a target temperature of 25°C to 26°C (77°F to 79°F) throughout the summer operating season.

The pool was built in 1931 and rebuilt in 1978, and it’s reportedly nearing the end of its service life, leaking as much as 30,000 L of water per hour. Plans to fully revamp and upgrade the pool could cost anywhere from $40 million to $300 million, which has understandably sparked debate in municipal politics.

Another point of contention is Vancouver’s insistence on scheduling swim times in blocks: 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., and 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Swimmers have to vacate the premises when their block is over. Seventy-five percent of the pool’s capacity is reservable online, leaving 25% for drop-in swims. Some argue that these COVID-era crowd-control measures unnecessarily restrict people’s spontaneity to drop by for a swim and their freedom to linger and lounge on the large pool deck.

But it wasn’t hard for us to book the morning block on a sunny August Sunday, and the pool was pretty chill and uncrowded. The afternoon block looked like it might be busier.

Given the outdoor nature of the pool, we initially put the kids in long-sleeved rash guards. But the wet shirts didn’t last long. In the cool morning air, they actually made the kids colder once they were wet, so the rash guards were quickly shed. Pretty soon, the kids got out of the pool altogether and opted to goof around on a FIFA soccer-net hammock instead.

The shallow wading area was massive, with a very gentle slope. It’s probably the biggest kiddie pool around. But that’s about all I can say for kid-friendliness at Kits pool. More modern pools like the UBC Aquatic Centre and Hillcrest Aquatic Centre offer more attractions for kids, such as hot tubs, a lazy river, basketball hoops, and water features. Kits Pool, by comparison, had only two very small slides at the deep end and a rather sad-looking “spray park” with water pooling on the ground. We’ve only seen crows in that area.

I took advantage of the ridiculous length of Kits Pool and swam some laps. The pool has an unusual oval shape and gets quite narrow at the far end. So even though it looks large enough for multiple conventional lanes, the whole pool essentially operates as one enormous lane.

Signage explains how the one-lane swimming works at Kits Pool: stay to the right of the two thick black lines unless passing. This made the swim feel pleasantly like open-water swimming in some ways. If you swim far enough away from the black lines that you can’t see them anymore, you have more freedom to choose your line while being responsible for sighting and avoiding other swimmers.

People can swim past on either side of you, and I felt less pressure to keep pace because I wasn’t holding up an entire lane. It was a nice middle ground between the structure of pool swimming and the freedom of open water.

As a swimmer who tends to take breaks at the wall too often, swimming in a supersized pool was great because it drastically reduced the opportunity for those breaks. A single lap is more than 250 m. Three laps, and I’d already covered the 750 m swim distance of a sprint triathlon.

I ended up swimming more than 1,300 m that day without feeling bored or tired. Because the pool is outdoors, I could even track the session as an open-water swim on my watch and use GPS instead of relying on indoor lap counting.

All in all, I loved Kits Pool for swim practice. The outdoor setting was fantastic: swimming under blue skies and white clouds, with views across the water toward the North Shore Mountains. It’s hard to imagine a more scenic place to swim laps in Vancouver.

I also support getting rid of some of the remaining COVID-era crowd-control rules. The UBC Aquatic Centre and Hillcrest Aquatic Centre don’t require everyone to clear out at fixed times, yet they can still impose capacity limits and accept online reservations. It seems reasonable that Kits Pool could do something similar and give swimmers more flexibility to arrive and leave when they want.

The facility is clearly aging, though, and could use a major update. With such a prime waterfront location and such a large footprint, a modernized Kitsilano Pool could become a major Vancouver attraction rather than remaining mostly a neat local gem for swimming enthusiasts.